Taylor Swift debuts ‘Delicate’ music video

The best Taylor Swift music videos are the persona-defining ones, the videos that perfectly capture the imagery, drama and prevailing emotions of the specific Swiftian era in which they’re set.

In her earliest videos, she’s a Nashville debutante who’s made up to appear twice hear age (Picture to Burn) or lounging in a cornfield in a youthful fantasy (Tim McGraw). In her Fearless-era videos, she’s the princess waiting to be rescued from her royal estate (Love Story) or her high school (You Belong With Me), usually while wearing some kind of white dress. Her Red album arrived in a whirlwind of youthful drama, vividly depicted in 22‘s blissful dance parties and I Knew You Were Trouble‘s dive bar brawls. Then came the big-budget productions of her high-gloss 1989 era, the best of which is Blank Space, which winked at Swift’s jilted-girlfriend public image by casting her as a deranged man-eating debutante.

With her new Delicate video, released during Sunday night’s iHeartRadio Music awards, Swift has finally gifted fans the first of such videos from her Reputation era. It sees Swift, surrounded by cameras and onlookers, receiving a mysterious note that renders her invisible, leaving her free to dance around an unidentified city in a retro fringed gown sans scrutiny.

It’s fitting that the video is set to the song Delicate, which sees Swift falling in love in dark bars and hidden rooms, hiding from the world with her new crush. Fans have barely seen Swift over the past two years, and she’s limited the public appearances she’s made around Reputation, keeping her relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn — about whom the majority of her new album is written — almost entirely away from the cameras.

With Delicate, fans finally have a music video that encapsulates this specific moment in Swift’s career, one of tightly-controlled privacy that betrays her longing for freedom and human connection. Plus, the video is classic Swift, as she cracks goofy faces in the mirror and twirls in the rain. Yes, the choreography falls somewhere between “a bit earnest” and “completely extra,” and yet the end product is somehow better as a result.

It’s a shame it took so long for Swift to share a video like this, because until now, the clips she’s released from Reputation have made all the wrong statements about this specific point in her career: that she was stewing in revenge and too obsessed with her own pop-music mythology, as seen in the head-spinning, references-loaded Look What You Made Me Dovideo; or that she was completely out of ideas and content to cosplay as an evil android (Ready For It?) or attempt a hip-hop video (End Game).

Imagine how different Reputation’s debut could’ve been if she chose Delicate to premiere as the album’s first video, rather than Look What You Made Me Do‘s notoriously fraught release during the VMAs last August. And yet, the girl dancing in Delicate doesn’t really seem to care about her media narrative.

Years from now, when Swift has moved onto future phases of her career, fans can have Delicate to remember this era by, a time when America’s once-highest-profile pop star retreated to fall in love and dance in the rain.